Archive for the ‘Home’ category

I found a cool Android app that fits a trend line to weight measurements and predicts meeting a goal.

Getting my weight down is something my doctors have been bugging me about. I’m using the same technique I used before, John Walker’s Hacker diet, but this time I’m tracking it with another Android app linked to the fatsecret.com site. What neither the site nor the app had was an easy graphing/trendline capability. Now I have that, too.

Looks like I’ll get down to my goal just in time to ruin it over the holidays.

But, if you have something you’re not using anyway, particularly still in the packaging, that you think I’d find useful or amusing, by all means regift it. Got a strange kitchen tool you don’t use? I’m trying all sorts of new things in my kitchen. Have a set of cool wineglasses, but you quit drinking years ago? I have a nice Pinot that needs a glass. Did you misunderstand a DVD title, and it turned out to be some weird science-fiction soft-core porn? Well.. I’ll give it a look, anway.

It just seems to me that having a gift whose only purpose is to demonstrate that gravity is still working is of zero, perhaps negative, value. If nothing else, I’ll find it amusing.

I stumbled into an article in the Washington Post this morning that includes this comment about the aspirational difference between “middle class” and “rich.”

“The middle-class aspirations include a decent home in a good neighborhood with a good school, and the ability to save for college and to make sure that your children have the opportunities to put themselves on a path to match or exceed yours,” Bernstein said. “If you’re upper class, you think about whether you want to move your horse from one barn to another barn.”

There are several things I find interesting about this notion, including one that happens to be purely about timing.

Teela’s riding instructor (I’m Teela’s dad) just decided to move her business to Arizona, so several of her riding buddies are thinking about new barns for their horses. All but one of them probably makes less than I do. For sure, none of them are rich. I wish I could afford a horse for Teela – a good one – because she’s put a lot of effort into her riding, and is at the point where she could start to compete. But I really can’t afford one, and if I could, I couldn’t afford to keep it.

My household income puts me in the top 6.5% of US households. The NY Times defines “rich” as the top 5%, which is a mere $157,176 in 2004 dollars. I live in the third richest county in the richest country in the history of the world, but I still worry about whether I’ll have enough money to cover a major illness or injury; whether I’d be able to find a job before my savings run out; or whether, if I save and invest carefully, Teela can go to a first or second tier university.

We’ve done a lot of things well, and we’ve been very fortunate, but from either an income or an aspirational perspective, I don’t think I’m rich. That puts me closer to Hilary Clinton than Barack Obama on the definition of “rich.”

This morning I couldn’t decide what to listen to on what turned out to be a very long ride into work. So I set my iPod to Shuffle, and the very first song it picked was Credence Clearwater Revival’s “Who’ll Stop the Rain.”

My first thought was to run out and get lottery tickets.

Of course, CCR’s music is (sometimes deliberately) ironic on multiple levels. A “Louisiana swamp band” from the San Fransisco Bay area, four middle-class Californians trying to sound like rednecks “Born on the Bayou.” Both Fogarty’s managed to avoid Vietnam despite being drafted, and thus wrote authoritatively about situations with which they had no experience. “Who’ll Stop the Rain” is apocryphally about the use of Agent Orange and its effects on American troops, and inspired a spectacularly good and under-appreciated Nick Nolte movie.

It was in fact written about the incessant rain at Woodstock, where CCR’s sets were all played wet.